MER Article The Islamist State and Sudanese Women The Islamist government in Sudan recently celebrated the third anniversary of the military coup that brought it to power by building a huge public park south of the Khartoum airport, featuring hundreds of hurriedly transplanted trees, bushes and flowers. The impressive determination and efficiency t Ellen Gruenbaum • 9 min read
MER Article For Another Kind of Morocco On September 13, 1991, after nearly 17 years in the prisons of His Majesty Hassan II, Moroccan activist Abraham Serfaty was released and expelled to France. This was not, to be sure, out of human rights considerations, or a measure of royal clemency: According to the Ministry of the Interior, an “in Miriam Rosen • 9 min read
MER Article Israel's Ultra-Orthodox The Palestinian delegation to the peace negotiations in Washington has enjoyed the services of an unusual group of advisers and supporters: four men wearing the unmistakable garb of ultra-Orthodox Jews, who were willing to tell anybody ready to listen that they were non-Zionist Jews. Israeli state television was delighted to Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi • 8 min read
MER Article Left In Limbo The late 1970s saw the demise of the organized left as a viable political force in Arab society. Egypt’s socialists were confined to intellectual circles gathered around al-Ahali newspaper and the Tagammu‘ party. The two largest and most vigorous Arab communist parties, in Iraq and Sudan, had been crushed Salim Tamari • 15 min read
MER Article Taking Up Space in Tlemcen: The Islamist Occuation of Urban Algeria Rabia Bekkar, an urban sociologist who has spent more than 12 years doing research in Tlemcen, Algeria, works at the Institut Parisien de Recherche: Architecture Urbanistique et Societe. She first came into contact with the Islamist movement in the form of neighborhood charitable associations. When the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) Hannah Davis • 13 min read
MER Article Islam, the State and Democracy The quest for democratization and human rights in the Middle East has prominently featured the term “civil society.” Oppression and corruption, it is agreed, have followed from an overly intrusive state and its bureaucracies. Democratization must include a withdrawal of the state to allow free spheres of social autonomies and Sami Zubaida • 20 min read
MER Article From the Editors (November/December 1992) With this issue we return to the question of the prospects for democratic forces in the Middle East, and the role of religiously based political movements there. These essays and interviews share a resolutely secularist perspective, a conviction that the construction of a just and viable social orde The Editors • 1 min read
MER Article Hourani, History of the Arab Peoples Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Faber and Faber, 1991). This is a rich and profoundly satisfying book, the high-water mark of Albert Hourani’s long and influential career as a writer and teacher. Hourani’s gifts as a teacher, and the care and affection he has devoted to his students, Peter Sluglett • 5 min read
MER Article Lavie, The Poetics of Military Occupation Smadar Lavie, The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories of Bedouin Identity Under Israeli and Egyptian Rule (California, 1990). The era of the nation-state has increasingly put into question pastoral nomadism as a way of life and as a distinctive cultural identity. In Saudi Arabia, Bedo Ted Swedenburg • 7 min read
MER Article Experts, News and Knowledge Sam Husseini, who works with Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), recently gave us a glimpse into the bizarre and incestuous world inhabited by the mainstream media and the Middle East experts they parade before us. Sam has made available a transcript from a $250-a-ticket New York City fundraiser held Al Miskin • 4 min read
MER Article Yitzhak Rabin and Israel's Death Squads Now that the abrasive and pugnacious Yitzhak Shamir has been replaced by the gravel-toned, pragmatic Yitzhak Rabin as Israel’s prime minister, should we anticipate a change for the better in Israel’s human rights record? Rabin cleverly campaigned for his June victory at the polls by ambiguously criticizing Likud’ Anita Vitullo Khoury • 7 min read
MER Article Peace Projects We may come to recall 1992 as the year of the peace activist in the burgeoning literary and cinematographic record of the Palestinian intifada. By rupturing the structure of the occupation, Palestinian popular collective action and the decisions of the nineteenth Palestine National Council expanded Joel Beinin • 4 min read
